In a career that began before World War II was over, Brennan, now 91, also set an example for how a restaurateur can be a civic leader. And she has been a trail-blazing woman in an industry still dominated by men.

I touch on all of this in a profile of Brennan published today in the New York Times. It's a long piece by newspaper standards but hardly large enough to contain all I learned about Brennan while reporting it.

Below are aspects of the restaurateur's character, career and life that stuck with me after the interviews were complete – and that I thought would be of particular interest to Brennan's fellow New Orleanians.

Her employees like her – This isn't 100 percent true, of course. Brennan has employed countless people in a difficult, relatively low-paying profession. She doesn't mince words. She has enemies and detractors. One of the first people she remembers firing was a chef "who chased me around the kitchen with a butcher knife."

That said, I've found over the years that people who've worked with Brennan for a long time tend to be unequivocally grateful. Lagasse is, as is current chef Tory McPhail; Prudhomme was, before he died.

The first day I interviewed Brennan for the Times story was also the day sous chef Tom Robey, who worked at Commander's for over two decades, notified Brennan he was taking a new job. He was still tearing up when I saw him at the restaurant again a week later.

Her principled leadership trickles down – Stephen Stryjewski, co-chef/owner of Cochon, Pêche, etc, worked as a Commander's line cook for a short time early in his career.

"I worked for Ella in 1996, when Jamie Shannon (the former Commander's chef who passed away in 2001) was still there," he told me. "I lived with a bunch of cooks in a house. My house caught on fire and two people passed away - one of whom was a fellow cook there at Commander's.

"Ella and Jamie were just so incredibly supportive. The whole Brennan family did everything in their power to help me."

Stryjewksi said he "showed up at Charity Hospital as a D.O.A." He was in a Baton Rouge burn unit for a month. "I was unable to work for 8 months. But they kept me on insurance. Jamie called me all the time, just to check and see if I was okay."

"I was nobody significant in the organization, but they still put forth effort to stick by me," Stryjewski continued. "It definitely taught me that it's important to do right by your people."

Reading is more than a hobby – Brennan rested her hand on a stack of newspapers and magazines when I sat to interview her one afternoon in her Garden District home.

"I'm always reading," she said. "How else can you get to know anything?"

She educated herself as a young professional in part by devouring cookbooks, but food has never been her only interest. "She read so much because she felt she had to be a great generalist," Lagasse told me. "She could talk sports, she could talk politics, she could obviously talk food and wine and restaurants."

Brennan encouraged Lagasse to become similarly well-informed.

"I insisted that he read the New York Times. I said, 'You don't have to read all the inside stories, but see the headlines, be aware. Don't let somebody walk in here and think you're a country bumpkin or something.'" Brennan told a young Lagasse, "Call the book store. You can have any book you want, any time you want it."

Fun fact: Turner Catledge, former editor of the New York Times, was once Brennan's neighbor.

She loves New York – While Brennan will forever be known for her work advancing Louisiana cuisine in her New Orleans restaurants, much of the intelligence she brought to her profession was gleaned on frequent trips to dine in New York City.

"New York was – was, is – the city of the world," Brennan said. "I'd get myself up there for about 10 days at a time. I'd do whatever I could possibly do, and take home whatever they gave me. It was an education," she said.

The New York restaurant "21" Club left a particular impression. "It was a restaurant that people wanted to come to. The city was proud of the restaurant."

Brennan also ate at Le Pavillon, the New York French restaurant that helped set the standard for fine dining in mid century America. Of its proprietor, Henri Soulé, who wasn't known for warmth, Brennan said, "I didn't like him as a man. He just wasn't very nice."

"In most cases, I've met her eating in my restaurants," said Drew Nieporent, the New York restaurateur. "And she wasn't just there to eat. She wanted to pick your brain a little bit, to figure out the secret sauce."

She's a feminist, but - When I first floated my opinion that Brennan is an important feminist figure as well as a culinary one, she turned to her daughter and business partner, Ti Martin, and asked, "Feminism, when did it start?"

It was a sincere question that also made the point that Brennan was well into her 40s before she started regularly hearing about gender issues in the workplace.

Martin recalled that in the '70s, when people would ask her mother "what it was like to be a woman doing what she does, she'd say, 'I never thought about it. I just got up and went to work.' That was the attitude, always."

She's not a quitter – Leslie Iwerks had never met Brennan when a mutual friend suggested the restaurateur would be a good subject for a documentary. The filmmaker was sold on the idea over dinner with Brennan at Commander's. One of the reasons was the sequence of events surrounding Brennan's firing from Brennan's, her family's restaurant, in 1973.

"She had just gotten divorced," Iwerks explained. "For her to have to start over from scratch in her 50s, as a single mother, and literally build a restaurant that was kind of ramshackle, that would be amazing today. But in her era?"

Iwerks' film, "Ella Brennan: Commanding the Table," will be available on Netflix in May.